Florida Water Services

For many people, the mere mention of Florida brings to mind visions of sandy beaches and sparkling water. Florida Water Services is a company that works to preserve and conserve these natural resources.

Owned by the MP Water Resources Group, a subsidiary of Minnesota Power Corporation, Florida Water Services is the largest investor-owned water and wastewater services company in Florida. Servicing more than 170,000 people in 120 communities, the company s services include the treatment and distribution of potable drinking water, the reclamation and treatment of wastewater, and the contract management of stand-alone community water systems throughout Florida.

Florida Water Services has approximately 500 employees at its headquarters in Orlando and in four customer service offices located across the state. Although the company s business is mainly in Florida, it maintains daily interactions with its predictive maintenance company, Instrumentation Services, Inc., of Charlotte, North Carolina.

Presenting problem Florida Water Services faced three major challenges. First, it had to devise an economical way for Instrumentation Services to remotely access Florida Water Services consolidated financial database, which resides in Orlando, over a low-bandwidth frame relay WAN connection. Second, the IS team required an efficient method of administering and assisting users in geographically dispersed regional offices around Florida.

The challenge: Share financial database information over a low-bandwidth connection.

Finally, Florida Water Services wanted to provide high-performance dial-up access to Datastream s MP2 maintenance management database.

Without a thin-client/server solution, Florida Water Services would have had to install the MP2 maintenance management and financial applications at all its remote sites. The LAN in Orlando is linked through a frame relay WAN to the company s regional customer service sites. Additionally, some sites connect to the main facility in Orlando to access MP2 over 28.8-Kbps modems.

At the time, Florida Water Services was using single-user remote-control software for its remote application access needs.(Single-user remote-control software has been defined in earlier case studies.)

Hardware and software The thin-client/server networking environment at the Florida Water Services includes:

Florida Water Services deploys a maintenance management database through dial-up and frame relay WAN.

• Compaq ProLiant 1500 dual processor 166-MHz Pentium server
  
  
• Oracle databases
  
  
• Frame relay WAN

Florida Water Services is using WinFrame to deploy Datastream s MP2 maintenance management and financial applications to branch offices over dial-up and frame relay WAN connections.

Solution and results Florida Water Services relies on the Citrix WinFrame thin-client/server solution to extend the reach of its business-critical financial application to both local users and branch office workers across its frame relay WAN. WinFrame is also enabling the company to cost-effectively deploy MP2.

Florida Water Services solution allowed for management of employees across the state.

The thin-client/server implementation using WinFrame is helping Florida Water Services to reduce its total cost of application ownership. The solution is cutting maintenance expenditures in half while providing branch office workers high-performance access to centrally located mission-critical information. It has enabled the IS staff in the main office to remotely manage applications and employees across the state.

With all application processing occurring on the server, the thin-client/server solution using WinFrame better utilizes network bandwidth. application response times have improved substantially, and operating costs for remote application deployment have been reduced.